Chapter 8

The Oslo Mythologies

On September 13, 1993, Israel and the PLO signed a declaration of principles, known as the Oslo Accord, on the White House lawn under the auspices of President Bill Clinton. The PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, would later receive a Nobel Peace prize for this Accord. It ended a long period of negotiations that had begun in 1992. Until that year, Israel had refused to negotiate directly with the PLO over the fate of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or about the Palestinian question in general. Successive Israeli governments preferred negotiating with Jordan, but since the mid-1980s they had allowed PLO representatives to join the Jordanian delegations.

There were several reasons for the change in the Israeli position that enabled direct negotiations with the PLO. The first was the victory of the Labor party in the 1992 elections (for the first time since 1977) and the formation of a government that was more interested in a political solution than the previous Likud-led administrations. The new government understood that the attempts to negotiate directly with the local Palestinian leadership about autonomy were stalled because every Palestinian decision was referred back to the PLO headquarters in Tunis; thus, a direct line was more useful.

The second reason concerned Israeli apprehensions arising from the Madrid peace initiative—an American enterprise to bring Israel, the Palestinians, and the rest of the Arab world together to agree on a solution in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. President George Bush Sr. and his secretary of state, William Baker, fathered this initiative in 1991. Both politicians asserted that Israel was an obstacle to peace and pressured the Israeli government to agree to a halt in settlement building so as to give the two-states solution a chance. Israeli–American relations at the time were at an unprecedented low. The new Israeli administration also initiated direct contact with the PLO themselves. The Madrid conference of 1991 and the peace efforts conducted under its auspices were probably the first genuine American effort to find a solution for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip based on Israeli withdrawal. The Israeli political elite wanted to thwart the move by nipping it in the bud. They preferred to initiate their own peace proposal and convince the Palestinians to accept it. Yasser Arafat was also unhappy with the Madrid initiative since in his eyes the local Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories, headed by the Gazan leader, Haidar Abdel-Shafi, and Faysal al-Husseini from Jerusalem, threatened his leadership and popularity by taking the lead in the negotiations.

Thus the PLO in Tunis and the Israeli foreign office in Jerusalem began behind-the-scenes negotiations while the Madrid peace effort continued. They found a willing mediator in Fafo, a Norwegian peace institute based in Oslo. The two teams eventually met in the open in August 1993 and with American involvement finalized the Declaration of Principles (DOP). The DOP was hailed as the end of the conflict when it was signed, with a lot of histrionics on the White House lawn in September 1993.

There are two myths associated with the Oslo process. The first is that it was a genuine peace process; the second that Yasser Arafat intentionally undermined it by instigating the Second Intifada as a terrorist operation against Israel.

The first myth was born out the desire of both sides in 1992 to reach a solution. However, when this failed, it quickly became a game of who to blame. Israeli hardliners pointed the finger at the Palestinian leadership. A more nuanced, liberal Zionist version of this assumption laid the blame on Yasser Arafat but also on the Israeli right, in particular Benjamin Netanyahu, for the impasse after the PLO leader’s death in 2004. In either scenario, the peace process is considered a real one, albeit a failure. However, the truth is more complex. The terms of the agreement were impossible to fulfill. The claim that Arafat refused to respect the Palestinian pledges made in the 1993 Accord does not bear scrutiny. He could not enforce pledges that were impossible to keep. For example, the Palestinian authorities were called upon to act as Israel’s security subcontractor inside the occupied territories and ensure that there would be no resistance activity. More implicitly, Arafat was expected to accept the Israeli interpretation of the final settlement emerging from the Accord without debate. The Israelis presented this fait accompli to the PLO leader in the summer of 2000 at the Camp David summit, where the Palestinian leader was negotiating the final agreement with the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and the US President, Bill Clinton.

Barak demanded a demilitarized Palestinian state, with a capital in a village near Jerusalem, Abu Dis, and without parts of the West Bank such as the Jordan Valley, the big Jewish settlement blocs, and areas in Greater Jerusalem. The future state would not have an independent economic and foreign policy and would be autonomous only in certain domestic aspects (such as running the educational system, tax collection, municipalities, policing, and maintaining the infrastructures on the ground). The formalization of this arrangement was to signify the end of the conflict and terminate any Palestinian demands in the future (such as the right of return for the 1948 Palestinian refugees).

The peace process was a busted flush from the outset. To understand the failure of Oslo, one has to widen the analysis and relate the events to two principles that remained unanswered throughout the Accord. The first was the primacy of geographical or territorial partition as the exclusive foundation of peace; the second the denial of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return and its exclusion from the negotiating table.

The proposition that the physical partition of the land was the best solution for the conflict appeared for the first time in 1937 as part of the British Royal Commission, the Peel Report. At that time the Zionist movement suggested that Jordan—Transjordan in those days—should annex the “Arab parts of Palestine,” but the idea was rejected by the Palestinians.¹ It was later re-adopted as the best way forward in the UN Partition Resolution of November 1947. The UN appointed a special commission of inquiry (UNSCOP) to try to find a solution. The members of the committee came from countries that had very little interest in or knowledge about Palestine. The Palestinian representative body, the Arab Higher Committee, and the Arab League, boycotted UNSCOP and refused to cooperate with it. This left a vacuum that was filled by the Zionist diplomats and leadership, who fed UNSCOP with their ideas for a solution. They suggested the creation of a Jewish state over 80 percent of Palestine; the Commission reduced it to 56 percent.² Egypt and Jordan were willing to legitimize the Israelis’ takeover of Palestine in 1948 in return for bilateral agreements with them (which were eventually signed in 1979 with Egypt and in 1994 with Jordan).

The idea of partition then reappeared under different names and references in the efforts led by the Americans after 1967. It was implicit in the new discourse that emerged: that of “territories for peace,” which every peace negotiator treated as a sanctified formula—the more territory Israel withdrew from the more peace it would get. Now the territory that Israel could withdraw from was within the 20 percent it had not taken over in 1948. In essence then, the idea was to build peace on the basis of partitioning the remaining 20 percent between Israel and whomever it would legitimize as a partner for peace (the Jordanians until the late 1980s, and the Palestinians ever since).

Unsurprisingly, therefore, this became the cornerstone of the logic that informed the opening discussions in Oslo. It was easily forgotten, however, that historically every time partition had been offered, it was followed by more bloodshed and failed to produce the desired peace. Indeed, the Palestinian leaders at no point ever demanded partition. It was always a Zionist and, later, an Israeli idea. In addition, the proportion of territory demanded by the Israelis grew as their power increased. Thus, as the idea of partition gained growing global support, it increasingly appeared to the Palestinians as an offensive strategy by other means. It was due only to the lack of alternatives that the Palestinian parties accepted this set of circumstances as a lesser evil within the terms of negotiation. In the early 1970s, Fatah acknowledged partition as a necessary means on the way to full liberation, but not as a final settlement by itself.³

So, in truth, without the application of extreme pressure, there is no reason in the world why a native population would ever volunteer to partition its homeland with a settler population. And therefore we should acknowledge that the Oslo process was not a fair and equal pursuit of peace, but a compromise agreed to by a defeated, colonized people. As a result, the Palestinians were forced to seek solutions that went against their interests and endangered their very existence.

The same argument can be made about the debates concerning the “two-states solution” that was offered in Oslo. This offer should be seen for what it is: partition under a different wording. Even in this scenario, although the terms of the debate appear different, Israel would not only decide how much territory it was going to concede but also what would happen in the territory it left behind. While the promise of statehood initially proved persuasive to the world and to some Palestinians, it soon came to sound hollow. Nonetheless, these two intertwined notions of territorial withdrawal and statehood were successfully packaged as parts of a peace deal in Oslo in 1993. Yet within weeks of the joint signature on the White House lawn, the writing was on the wall. By the end of September, the Accord’s vague principles had already been translated into a new geopolitical reality on the ground under the terms of what was called the Oslo II (or Taba⁴) agreement. This included not just partitioning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between “Jewish” and “Palestinian” zones, but partitioning further all the Palestinian areas into small cantons or Bantustans. The peace cartography of 1995 amounted to a bisected series of Palestinian zones that resembled, in the words of quite a few commentators, a Swiss cheese.⁵

Once this program became clear, the decline of the negotiations was swift. Before the final summit meeting in the summer of 2000, Palestinian activists, academics, and politicians had realized that the process they supported did not involve an actual Israeli military withdrawal from the occupied territories, nor did it promise the creation of a real state. The charade was revealed and progress ground to a halt. The ensuing sense of despair contributed to the outburst of the second Palestinian uprising in the autumn of 2000.

The Oslo peace process did not fail simply due to its adherence to the principle of partition. In the original Accord there was an Israeli promise that the three issues that trouble the Palestinians most—the fate of Jerusalem, the refugees, and the Jewish colonies—would be negotiated when the interim period of five years came to a successful end. Within this interim period, the Palestinians had to prove they could serve effectively as Israel’s security subcontractors, preventing any guerrilla or terror attacks against the Jewish state, its army, settlers, and citizens. Contrary to the promise made in the Oslo DOP, when the five years of the first stage were over, the second stage, in which the more substantial issues for the Palestinians were meant to be discussed, did not commence. The Netanyahu government claimed that it was unable to initiate this second phase because of Palestinian “misbehavior” (which included “incitement in schools” and weak condemnations of terror attacks against soldiers, settlers, and citizens). In truth, however, the process was stalled mainly by the assassination of the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in November 1995. The murder was followed by the victory of the Likud party, headed by Netanyahu, in the 1996 national elections. The new prime minister’s overt objection to the Accord put the brake on the process. Even when the Americans forced him to restart negotiations, progress was extremely slow until the return to power of the Labor party, under Ehud Barak, in 1999. Barak was determined to complete the process with a final peace agreement, an impulse fully supported by the Clinton administration.

Israel’s final offer, delivered during discussions at Camp David in the summer of 2000, proposed a small Palestinian state, with a capital in Abu Dis, but without significant dismantling of any settlements and no hope for return of the refugees. After the Palestinians rejected the offer, there was an informal attempt by the deputy Israeli foreign minister, Yossi Beilin, to offer a more reasonable deal. On the issue of refugees he now agreed to their return to a future Palestinian state and symbolic repatriation to Israel. But these informal terms were never ratified by the state. (Thanks to the leaking of key documents, known as the Palestine papers, we now have a better insight into the nature of the negotiations, and readers who wish to examine other aspects of the negotiations between 2001 and 2007 are advised to consult this accessible source.⁶) And yet, as negotiations collapsed, it was the Palestinian leadership, rather than the Israeli politicians, who were accused of being intransigent, leading to the collapse of Oslo. This does a disservice to those involved and to how seriously the prospects of partition were taken.

The exclusion of the Palestinian right of return from the agenda is the second reason why the Oslo Accord was irrelevant as a peace process. While the partition principle reduced “Palestine” to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the exclusion of the refugee issue, and of that of the Palestinian minority inside Israel, shrank the “Palestinian people” demographically to less than half of the Palestinian nation. This lack of attention to the refugee question was not new. Ever since the beginning of the peace efforts in post-Mandatory Palestine, the refugees have been exposed to a campaign of repression and negligence. Ever since the first peace conference on post-1948 Palestine, the Lausanne meeting of April 1949, the refugee problem has been excluded from the peace agenda and disassociated from the concept of “The Palestine Conflict.” Israel participated in that conference only because it was a precondition for its acceptance as a full member of the UN,⁷ who also demanded that Israel sign a protocol, called the May Protocol, committing itself to the terms of Resolution 194, which included an unconditional call for the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or to be given compensation. A day after it was signed in May 1949, Israel was admitted to the UN and immediately retracted its commitment to the protocol.

In the wake of the June 1967 war, the world at large accepted the Israeli claim that the conflict in Palestine began with that war and was essentially a struggle over the future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Several Arab regimes also accepted this notion, abandoning the refugee problem as an issue. However, the refugee camps soon became sites of intensive political, social, and cultural activity. It was there, for example, that the Palestinian liberation movement was reborn. Only the UN continued to mention in several of its resolutions the obligation of the international community to ensure the full and unconditional repatriation of the Palestinian refugees—the commitment first made in Resolution 194 in 1948. Still today the UN includes a body named “the committee for the inalienable rights of the Palestinian refugees,” but it has had little effect on the peace process.

The Oslo Accord was no different. In this document, the refugee issue was buried in a subclause, almost invisible in the mass of words. The Palestinian partners to the Accord contributed to this obfuscation, probably out of negligence rather than intentionally, but the result was the same. The refugee problem—the heart of the Palestine conflict, a reality acknowledged by all Palestinians, wherever they are, and by anyone sympathizing with the Palestinian cause—was marginalized in the Oslo documents. Instead, the issue was handed to a short-lived multilateral group who were asked to focus on the 1967 refugees, the Palestinians who were expelled or left after the June war. The Oslo Accord in fact substituted for an embryonic attempt, born out of the 1991 Madrid peace process, to form a multilateral group that would discuss the refugee issue on the basis of UN General Assembly Resolution 194. The group was led by the Canadians, who regarded the right of return as a myth, throughout 1994, and then it petered out. In any case, without any official announcement, the group stopped meeting and the fate of even the 1967 refugees (more than 300,000 of them) was abandoned.⁸

The implementation of the Accord after 1993 only made things worse. The rules of the agreement required the abandonment by the Palestinian leadership of the right of return. Thus only five years after the cantonization of “the Palestinian entity” and its transformation into a Bantustan, the Palestinian leadership was given permission to express its wish to deal with the refugee problem as part of the negotiations over the permanent settlement of the Palestine question. Nevertheless, the Israeli state was able to define the terms of discussion and so chose to distinguish between, on the one hand, the introduction of the “refugee problem” as a legitimate Palestinian grievance, and, on the other, the demand for the “right of return,” which it was able to describe as a Palestinian provocation.

In the last ditch attempt to save the agreement at the Camp David summit in 2000, the refugee issue did not fare any better. In January 2000, the Barak government presented a paper, endorsed by the American negotiators, defining the parameters of the negotiations. This was an Israeli diktat, and until the summit was convened in the summer, the Palestinians failed to produce a counterproposal. The final “negotiations” were in essence a combined Israeli and American effort to get the Palestinians to accept the paper, which included, among other things, an absolute and categorical rejection of the Palestinian right of return. It left open for discussion the number of refugees that might be allowed to return to the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority, although all involved understood that these crammed areas were unable to absorb more people, while there was plenty of space for repatriating refugees in the rest of Israel and Palestine. This part of the discussion was a meaningless gesture, introduced simply to silence any criticism without offering a real solution.

The peace process of the 1990s was thus no such thing. The insistence on partition and the exclusion of the refugee issue from the agenda rendered the Oslo process at best a military redeployment and a rearrangement of Israeli control in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. At worst, it inaugurated a new system of control that made life for the Palestinians in the occupied territories far worse than it was before.

After 1995, the impact of the Oslo Accord as a factor that ruined Palestinian society, rather than bringing peace, became painfully clear. Following Rabin’s assassination and the election of Netanyahu in 1996, the Accord became a discourse of peace that had no relevance to the reality on the ground. During the period of the talks—between 1996 and 1999—more settlements were built, and more collective punishments were inflicted on the Palestinians. Even if you believed in the two-states solution in 1999, a tour of either the West Bank or the Gaza Strip would have convinced you of the words of the Israeli scholar, Meron Benvenisti, who wrote that Israel had created irreversible facts on the ground: the two-states solution was killed by Israel.⁹ Since the Oslo process was not a genuine peace process, the Palestinians’ participation in it, and their reluctance to continue it, was not a sign of their alleged intransigence and violent political culture, but a natural response to a diplomatic charade that solidified and deepened Israeli control over the occupied territories.

This then leads on to the second myth concerning the Oslo process: that Arafat’s intransigence ensured the failure of the Camp David Summit in 2000. Two questions have to be answered here. Firstly, what happened in the summer of 2000 at Camp David—who was responsible for the summit’s failure? Secondly, who was responsible for the violence of the Second Intifada? The two questions will help us engage directly with the common assumption that Arafat was a warmonger who came to Camp David to destroy the peace process and returned to Palestine with a determination to start a new Intifada.

Before we answer these questions, we should remember the reality in the occupied territories on the day Arafat left for Camp David. My main argument here is that Arafat came to Camp David to change that reality while the Israelis and the Americans arrived there determined to maintain it. The Oslo process had transformed the occupied territories into a geography of disaster, which meant that the Palestinians’ quality of life was far worse after the Accord that it was before. Already in 1994, Rabin’s government forced Arafat to accept its interpretation of how the Accord would be implemented on the ground. The West Bank was divided to the infamous areas A, B, and C. Area C was directly controlled by Israel and constituted half of the West Bank. The movement between, and inside, these areas became nearly impossible, and the West Bank was cut off from the Gaza Strip. The Strip was also divided between Palestinians and Jewish settlers, who took over most of the water resources and lived in gated communities cordoned off with barbered wire. Thus the end result of this supposed peace process was a deterioration in the quality of Palestinian lives.

This was Arafat’s reality in the summer of 2000 when he arrived at Camp David. He was being asked to sign off as a final settlement the irreversible facts on the ground that had turned the idea of a two-states solution into an arrangement that at best would allow the Palestinians two small Bantustans and at worst would allow Israel to annex more territory. The agreement would also force him to give up any future Palestinian demands or propose a way of alleviating some of the daily hardships most Palestinians suffered from.

We have an authentic and reliable report of what happened at Camp David from the State Department’s Hussein Agha and Robert Malley.¹⁰ Their detailed account appeared in the New York Review of Books and begins by dismissing the Israeli claim that Arafat ruined the summit. The article makes the point that Arafat’s main problem was that, in the years since Oslo, life for the Palestinians in the occupied territories had only got worse. Quite reasonably, according to these two American officials, he suggested that instead of rushing within two weeks “to end the conflict for once and for all,” Israel should agree to certain measures that might restore the Palestinians’ faith in the usefulness and benefits of the peace process. The period of two weeks, incidentally, was not an Israeli demand, but a foolish time frame insisted upon by Bill Clinton, who was considering his own legacy.

There were two major proposals that Arafat signaled as potential areas of discussion, which, if accepted, might improve the reality on the ground. The first was to de-escalate the intensive colonization of the West Bank that had increased after Oslo. The second was to put an end to the daily brutalization of normal Palestinian life, manifested in severe restrictions of movement, frequent collective punishments, arrests without trial, and constant humiliations at the checkpoints. All these practices occurred in every area where there was a contact between the Israeli army or civil administration (the body running the territories) and the local population.

According to the testimony of the American officials, Barak refused to change Israel’s policy towards the Jewish colonies or the daily abuse of the Palestinians. He took a tough position that left Arafat with no choice. Whatever Barak proposed as a final settlement did not mean much if he could not promise immediate changes in the reality on the ground. Predictably, Arafat was blamed by Israel and its allies for being a warmonger who, immediately after returning from Camp David, encouraged the Second Intifada. The myth here is that the Second Intifada was a terrorist attack sponsored and perhaps even planned by Yasser Arafat. The truth is, it was a mass demonstration of dissatisfaction at the betrayals of Oslo, compounded by the provocative actions of Ariel Sharon. In September 2000, Sharon ignited an explosion of protest when, as the leader of the opposition, he toured Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, with a massive security and media presence.

The initial Palestinian anger was expressed in non-violent demonstrations that were crushed with brutal force by Israel. This callous repression led to a more desperate response—the suicide bombers who appeared as the last resort in the face of the strongest military power in the region. There is telling evidence from Israeli newspaper correspondents of how their reports on the early stages of the Intifada—as a non-violent movement crushed by the Israeli army—were shelved by their editors so as to fit the narrative of the government. One of them was a deputy editor of Yeidot Ahronoth, the main daily in the state, who wrote a book about the misinformation produced by the Israeli media in the early days of the Second Intifada.¹¹ Israeli propagandists claimed the Palestinians’ behavior only confirmed the famous saying of the veteran Israeli super-diplomat, Abba Eban, that the Palestinians do not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.

We have a better understanding today of what triggered the furious Israeli reaction. In their book Boomerang, two senior Israeli journalists, Ofer Shelah and Raviv Drucker, interview the Israeli general chief of staff and strategists in the ministry of defense, providing us with inside knowledge on the way these officials were thinking about the issue.¹² Their conclusion was that in the summer of 2000 the Israeli army was frustrated after its humiliating defeat at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon. There was a fear that this defeat made the army look weak, and so a show of force was needed. A reassertion of their dominance within the occupied territories was just the kind of display of sheer power the “invincible” Israeli army needed. It was ordered to respond with all its might, and so it did. When Israel retaliated against a terror attack on a hotel in the sea resort of Netanya in April 2002 (in which thirty people were killed), it was the first time the military had used airplanes to bomb the dense Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the West Bank. Instead of hunting down the individuals who had carried out the attacks, the most lethal heavy weapons were brought to bear on innocent people.

Another common reference in the blame game Israel and the United States played after the failure at Camp David was that of reminding public opinion that there was a chronic problem with Palestinian leaders, who at the moment of truth would expose their warmongering ways. The claim that “there is no one to talk to on the Palestinian side” resurfaced in that period as a common analysis from pundits and commentators in Israel, Europe, and the United States. Such allegations were particularly cynical. The Israeli government and army had tried by force to impose its own version of Oslo—one that was meant to perpetuate the occupation forever but with Palestinian consent—and even an enfeebled Arafat could not accept it. He and so many other leaders who could have led their people to reconciliation were targeted by the Israelis, and most of them, including probably Arafat himself, were assassinated. The targeted killing of Palestinian leaders, including moderate ones, was not a new phenomenon in the conflict. Israel began this policy in 1972 with the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani, a poet and writer who also could have led his people to reconciliation. The fact that he was targeted, as a secular and leftist activist, is symbolic of the role Israel played in killing those Palestinians it later “regretted” not being there as partners for peace.

In May 2001, President George Bush Jr. appointed Senator Robert Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East. Mitchell produced a report about the causes of the Second Intifada, deciding, “We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.”¹³ On the other hand, he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy places of Islam.

In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only morally wrong in his eyes, but would also, as he was well aware, strengthen the hand of those who regarded the armed struggle against Israel as the only way to liberate Palestine. At any given moment, Israel could have stopped the Second Intifada, but the army needed a show of “success”; only when this was achieved through the barbaric operation of “Defensive Shield” in 2002 and the building of the infamous “apartheid wall” did they succeed temporarily in quelling the uprising.